A Post About Nothing
Contents
This post is about nothing in particular. Well, almost.
I recently decided to add a bunch of new features to this blog, things that make reading here a little more fun than scrolling down a wall of text. Once they were done I wanted to write a post that shows all of them off, and I sat there for a while trying to find one topic that could carry every single feature. I couldn’t find one. So this post is about nothing specifically.1 It’s about the features, and since I have to fill it with something, it’s also about what I’ve been watching, reading and messing around with lately.
Before anything else, a few things that work on every post without me doing anything:
- The Aa button at the top of the page lets you change the text size, how wide the page is, serif or sans, and the spacing between lines. It remembers what you picked.
- Highlight any words in a post and a little bar pops up. You can copy the quote, copy a link that jumps straight to those exact words, share it to Telegram or X, or turn it into a quote card picture you can save. Go on, try it on this sentence.
- Footnotes sit in the margin next to their line if your screen is wide enough, like the one up there. On a phone they stay at the bottom, and tapping the number shows them in place.
- Pick up where you left off. This post is long, so if you leave halfway and come back later, it offers to take you back to where you stopped.
Soul Eater, and the photo walk
I’m currently watching Soul Eater, and it’s a very interesting show. (yes, i know, it came out in 2008. i’m late, leave me alone)2 Scroll slowly through this part. The picture stays on screen while the words move past it, and it zooms in when the words get to a detail.
The show is set at the Death Weapon Meister Academy in Death City, a school run by Death himself. The students come in pairs: a meister, and a weapon, who is a person that can turn into a weapon. Together they hunt down 99 evil human souls and one witch’s soul, and if they get all of them, the weapon becomes a Death Scythe, a weapon for Death to use.
In the middle of it all is Maka, the meister, and her scythe Soul, the one crouching at the front with the shark teeth. Around them are Black Star, who wants to surpass God and won’t shut up about it, his partner Tsubaki, and Death the Kid, Death’s own son, who falls apart when something isn’t perfectly symmetrical. His two pistols are the Thompson sisters, Liz and Patty.
And then there’s this guy. Asura is the first kishin, a demon god that Death sealed away under the academy, and madness is the thing the whole show keeps circling back to. The way he’s drawn, all bandages and eyes and scarves, is one of the creepiest designs I’ve seen in an anime. (the eyes, man)
A small spoiler for the first two episodes, blurred until you tap it: Maka and Soul get all 99 souls almost right away, then lose every single one of them, because the witch they hunt for the last soul turns out to be a cat.
What I didn’t expect was how much Soul Eater would change the way I see another show. It has honestly been an eye-opener.
Gachiakuta, and the chat box
I used to hate Gachiakuta. I wanted to like it, I really did, and I couldn’t get into it as much as I thought I would.
This next part is a chat box. When I want two voices to talk, the first one sits on the left and the second on the right, like a text thread. Here it’s me arguing with the version of me who gave up on Gachiakuta.
Me, back then: I tried Gachiakuta. I wanted to like it, but I couldn’t get into it. Honestly, I kind of hated it.
Me, now: You went in cold. You hadn’t seen Soul Eater yet.
Me, back then: What does an anime from 2008 have to do with it?
Me, now: The person who draws Gachiakuta learned the job working under the person who drew Soul Eater.
Me, back then: So the art, the energy, the weapons that are more than weapons…
Me, now: It all comes from somewhere. Watching Soul Eater feels like getting the first half of a conversation I walked into halfway.
Me, back then: Fine. I’ll go back to it.
Kei Urana, who writes and draws Gachiakuta, worked as an assistant to Atsushi Ohkubo, the mangaka behind Soul Eater, on Ohkubo’s next series, Fire Force.3 Ohkubo has since called Urana a legitimate successor, which is about the biggest compliment one mangaka can give another. Even the anime comes from the same place: Soul Eater was made by Bones in 2008, and the Gachiakuta anime in 2025 by Bones Film, which is part of Bones.
Drag the handle across the two posters below. One is Soul Eater, the other is Gachiakuta, and both are on a red background, which I’m choosing to believe is not a coincidence. (it probably is) This is the before and after slider. It’s really meant for the same place photographed twice, but this works too.
Rudo
Gachiakuta follows Rudo, a kid from the slums of a town that throws its trash, and the people it doesn’t want, over the edge to the world below. Rudo gets blamed for a murder he didn’t commit and thrown down there too, where he ends up with the Cleaners, who fight monsters made out of trash with Jinki, everyday objects someone has cared about for so long that in the right hands they turn into weapons.
That’s the part that clicked after Soul Eater. In Ohkubo’s show the weapons are people. In Urana’s they’re the things people cared about. It’s the same idea turned around, and I think that’s why Gachiakuta is going to be even more appealing to me now than Soul Eater.
That’s the image beside text block, by the way. The picture opens big if you click it, and on a phone it sits on top of the text instead of beside it.
And now Noragami
Noragami
I’m also in the middle of Noragami. It’s about Yato, a minor god with no shrine who does odd jobs for five yen each, and Hiyori, a girl whose soul keeps slipping out of her body after she’s hit by a bus pushing him out of the way.
I didn’t plan this, but it’s the same idea again. Yato fights with a shinki, the spirit of a dead person that a god turns into a weapon. That’s three shows in a row about weapons that are someone. And Noragami is a Bones anime too, from 2014, so at this point my taste might just be “whatever Bones made”. (not a complaint)
A book I read one page at a time
I’ve been reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy for months now.4 It’s not a long book, but I’m reading it at about a page a week, sometimes a page every two weeks. It’s kind of funny when I say it out loud, but it’s also interesting, and I’m honestly enjoying the process. I once wrote a whole post telling myself to Read Slowly, and I don’t think this is what I had in mind.
The real reason it’s this slow is work. I’m usually exhausted by the time I’m done, so I just try to distract myself with anime or music, and my reading habits are slowly going away. My attention and focus are bad too, if I’m being honest. I need to rebuild that concentration, and go through the mental gymnastics of sitting with one thing for a while again. Back in 2023 I even wrote tips for building a reading habit back up. Maybe it’s time I read my own post.
The server, and XDM coming back
I’ve also been messing around with my server, trying out new things on it, and it’s been going great. It runs ZimaOS, and I’m a huge fan. I love what they’re doing with it.
The other thing that made me happy recently is seeing XDM, the Xtreme Download Manager, back again. It’s been around since 2013, and after its last release in July 2023 it went quiet for over three years. For a while it looked like it had stopped for good. Then in October it came back as XDM 9, rebuilt from the ground up with a new look. The README says it’s in active development again, and when I scrolled down to the contributors, Claude was sitting right there in the list.
That’s where this all connects. On November 2, a Telegram channel I check all the time, rust_script, shared a post by Jakub Krehel called The era of personal software. His point is that AI has made building a tool just for yourself cheap enough to be worth doing, and he walks through a health app he made that only he uses, which ended up on his home screen. XDM is the same thing from the other side: an old tool getting a second life because one person can now do what used to need a team.
And this blog is my own small piece of personal software. Every feature in this post was built in a day, for exactly one person’s taste, mine, with Claude doing most of the typing. Nobody asked for a constellation of my posts or a ghost that haunts the old ones. I wanted them, so now they exist.
The features, one by one
So that’s the nothing this post is about. Here’s everything it was actually for, in case you missed some of it.
- Margin notes: the footnotes, beside their line on wide screens.
- Post previews: hover a link to one of my own posts, like This Blog is Haunted, and you get its title, date, picture and first lines before you click.
- The ghost note: posts older than two years now open with a note saying an earlier version of me wrote them. My old Samurai Champloo post is one of them, and so is that 2023 reading post, go and see.
- New words: the list at the bottom of this post. Every word in it gets a dotted underline wherever it shows up, like mangaka or shinki, so tap one. They also go on the words page with every word I’ve picked up from my reviews.
- Spoilers: blurred until you tap them, like the one about the cat.
- Hand-drawn marks: highlighted, circled, underlined, boxed, struck through and crossed out, each one drawn on as you scroll to it.
- The photo walk: the Soul Eater part.
- The before and after slider: the two posters.
- Image beside text: Rudo and Noragami.
- Link icons: links to Wikipedia, YouTube, GitHub, Spotify, Telegram and Goodreads get a small mark so you know where you’re going, like my Telegram. The marks in this post are drawn with rough-notation, the constellation with d3, and I write all of this in Sveltia CMS.
- The constellation: on the Archive page, every post as a dot, grouped around its categories. You can zoom in until every dot shows its title, and on a phone you just swipe to move around. You can also click a year there to see everything I wrote that year.
- The Now card: on the home page, what I’m reading, writing and watching right now.
- The chat box: two voices, left and right. There’s also a script version, with the names on the left instead of bubbles. This is roughly how all of this started:
Me: I want to add more interactivity to the blog and more stuff there.
Claude: Here are twenty ideas, each one running live on your own posts. Pick the ones you want.
Me: Picks are in.
Claude: Sixteen of them are live now.
And one more that isn’t on any list: type the word boo anywhere on this blog.
That’s it. A post about nothing that somehow turned into a post about weapons that are people. I’ll take it.
New words
mangaka (noun)
A person who writes and draws manga.
Example: Kei Urana was an assistant on Fire Force before debuting as a mangaka with Gachiakuta.
kishin (noun)
In Soul Eater, a demon god: someone who has eaten innocent human souls and been taken over by madness.
Example: Asura was the first kishin, and Death sealed him away under the academy.
shinki (noun)
In Noragami, the spirit of a dead person that a god names and turns into a weapon or a tool.
Example: After his old shinki quits, Yato spends the first episode without a weapon.
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The anime aired while the manga was still running, so its last stretch goes its own way. The manga ended in 2013. ↩
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Fire Force ran in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 2015 to 2022, and Gachiakuta started in the same magazine in February 2022, the same month Fire Force ended. ↩
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For anyone who hasn’t read it: Ivan Ilyich is a judge who lived a proper, comfortable life, and the book follows him as he faces death and starts to see how little of that life was really his. ↩